Holding Their Own VII: Phoenix Star Read Online Free Page B

cheerful eyes and winning smile causing his chest to constrict in frustration and remorse. “I couldn’t save you, Beverly,” he whispered. “I would have gladly sacrificed my life so you could live, but I think you knew that. I hope you knew that.”
    The Colonel replayed the events of that fateful day. The hasty departure from Houston, bullets chasing the stolen airplane as it lifted off with far too little fuel. Once in the air, there was only one destination that would meet his desperate needs – his former employee’s ranch.
    Things might have ended better, but there was the emergency landing, a controlled crash that left him skewered through the chest by a 16-inch length of aluminum airframe. Beverly and the grandkids had been traveling with him and pulled him out of the crumpled plane into the isolated landscape of the West Texas desert.
    Despite the horrific experience, his injuries, and the remoteness of their surroundings, the survivors had clung to hope. Before exhausting their fuel supply, they had buzzed Bishop’s ranch twice and then attempted the ill-fated landing. They prayed someone would come looking for them. Unfortunately, their prayers were answered.
    The Colonel tipped his brandy, savoring the thick liquid before swallowing. He chased the warm sensation with another draw on his stogie. “The sins of the flesh,” he mumbled to the fireplace.
    There was no way his party and he could have anticipated the situation on the ground that day. After all, West Texas was well known for its large, open spans of wilderness and did not command a high population count. When those thugs had approached from the south, the Colonel had warned everyone, but it was too little, too late. Out-gunned and out-manned, Mrs. Porter had been taken hostage, and eventually was executed right before the Colonel and his grandchildren’s eyes. Despite the warmth of the fire and brandy, he shivered at the memory, a cold chill commanding his very core.
    He shuddered at the vivid recollection of his lying next to the plane’s wreckage, his life force leaking from his body. Powerless to affect the situation, he had watched the murder of his soul mate. If we had only been able to land the Cessna without injury, things would have been different. That day, a stranger by the name of “Helplessness” had visited the Colonel. He would never, as long as he breathed the air of this earth, forget the introduction.
    A lifetime of command, control, and discipline had left him unprepared for the relationship with “Helplessness.” He had always been the victor, the man left standing on countless battlefields, the survivor of the most daring encounters of insightful strategy and its resulting brutal assaults. When the stranger visited him that day, he recognized immediately that it was a far worse experience than greeting Death.
    Death was a known, acknowledged presence for men in the Colonel’s line of work… men who lived by violence and combat, men who walked away intact, at least complete enough to go do it all again. Death would have been welcome that day, an old acquaintance, familiar and recognized.
    It was the same with all soldiers , he mused. All men of arms fear capture more than death. Every warrior swears he’ll never be taken alive. We all desperately want to avoid meeting Helplessness. The reaper of life is a given, an accepted consequence for stepping onto the field of battle. But not Helplessness. He was to be avoided at all costs.
    As he had stared at Mrs. Porter’s empty, lifeless eyes that day, the Colonel had known his grandchildren would be next. He fully expected those monsters, the men who controlled his family’s destiny, to kill David and Samantha right in front of him. And he was absolutely powerless to do anything about it. He had been completely in the stranger’s grasp.
    Again the cigar, and then the warm burn of the brandy. The Colonel gazed at the fire, the flame’s reflection in his eyes a telling